Page 23

Diesel

When the first light of dawn forces my eyes open and I turn over in bed to see Samantha asleep beside me, her hair splayed wildly upon the pillow, a subtle smile sitting on her lips, her eyes moving beneath her eyelids as a dream plays out behind them. At first, it’s all I can do but smile, but then the realization of what I’ve done, who I did it with, and everything else that I know I shouldn’t feel, but do, cuts through the thin, dozy veil of the early morning and I leap out of bed and take my head in my hands.

I bite back a scream.

Regret pierces my chest like a bullet, and one name echoes in my head — Brandy.

Pain sends me stalking to the kitchen in search of the bottle of bourbon from last night. It sits, empty, on the counter. I mutter fuck a dozen times beneath my breath, then I grab the thing and wrap my mouth around the tip and tilt my head back, hoping for some stray drips to soothe the agony in my gut.

When I get nothing, I slam the bottle back on the counter.

Why the fuck did I let that happen? And with her, of all people?

How could I be so fucking weak?

Getting close to someone, fucking them, much less letting them in? And especially someone like her. Fuck me. I know better than that. There’s no excuse for my weakness, for my idiocy. She has fucking Victor Moretti after her ass, not to mention a druggie brother who’s a literal walking liability with trackmarked veins, and still, despite everything I know — all the fucking experience I have not getting close to people who are going to fuck up my life — I do the one thing I know I shouldn’t do and I let her in.

Reflexively, I reach for the empty bottle again, my knuckles popping with the tightness of my grip.

I’m a goddamn fool.

Because it isn’t just about sex with her. It can’t be.

If it were just sex, I wouldn’t be feeling this way, wouldn’t be wishing the bottle was full, and that there were a handful of others sitting on the shelf next to it, ready to drown this tempest that’s roiling my heart.

Brandy.

I shake my head.

With Samantha, it’s not just sex. It’s something else entirely. Something deeper. Something inconceivably powerful that rips past all my defenses, slices through my ribs, pierces my heart and takes my greatest pain and worst mistake, and pulls it out into the light of day to make me stare the damn thing in the face.

Doing so makes me think that maybe there will be a day it doesn’t hurt so much.

Maybe there will be a day after Brandy.

And I don’t know if I fucking want that.

Don’t know if I even deserve it.

After what I did, who I did it to, to think that an alternative to this running, this hiding, this lamentable suffering inside me that makes me feel like every day alive is hell, is terrifying.

How can anyone know what I did and even think of forgiving me?

Yet she does.

She heard it all, every detail, and her answer wasn’t to run away, but to come closer.

“Are you OK?” Her voice hits me so suddenly I nearly jump. When the fuck did she wake up?

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I said I’m fine.”

She sits up in bed, all grace and curves and smiles — none of which I feel I deserve to even look at — and then she turns, swinging her long, slender legs over the side. For a second, her feet dangle there, and she swings them a little, looking at me with eyes that see too much. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t,” I say, knowing that she probably does. Empathy, understanding, patience, kindness — all curse words I think of when I look at her; I think of them with the same vicious vulgarity I used to hurl at the insurgents who tried to take my head off with AK-47s or blow me to pieces with roadside bombs when I was in the Army.

Except no weapon I ever carried can match up to the lethality of the empathy I see in her eyes.

“You’re mad at yourself, aren’t you?”

“No.” The word is supposed to come out definitive, declarative, a sincere back the fuck off and yet, even to my own ears, I sound more like a toddler with paint-covered hands trying to deny to their parent the sudden appearance of handprints all over the living room wall.

“You are. And that’s OK.”

My mouth clicks shut. “It is?”

She stands from the bed and walks toward me, a smile on her face that keeps me rooted in place. “Grief can ruin us. It’s all the love you want to give, but it has nowhere to go. So it stays inside you. It grows. It fills up your chest and makes your heart feel like it’s going to explode. It sits in your throat, chokes you, until you wonder if you’ll ever breathe again. It gathers in the corners of your eyes, and comes out in tears, and you wonder if you’ll ever look at the world the same. I’ve felt it for my brother sometimes, even though he’s still alive. I feel it for the happy kid he was, on those dark days where I believe I’ll never see that kid again. The only way through it is to grieve. And when you’re doing it, when you’re grieving, it’s going to make you hate yourself, the people close to you, the world, everything. But it gets better.” She puts a hand on my arm. “So what you’re feeling is OK. Just remember to be kind to yourself, forgive yourself, and accept that you have people around you who, even when you’re at your worst, still care about you, and they are going to be with you every step of the way.”

I release the bottle and put my hand over hers and squeeze it.

Deep eyes look back at me, begging for me to take a leap, and as much as I want to, there’s still a part of me that can’t let go. Of her. Brandy.

Even thinking her name with Samantha beside me, naked as she was last night, feels like the worst betrayal.

Despite her being dead and gone, I somehow discover a new way to make Brandy suffer.

“I need some air. Wait here,” I say, and pull on some clothes on my way to the door.

Out in the fresh air, I take the cool dawn into my lungs. It feels like the first breath I’ve had this morning. Things seem clearer. More certain. I know what I need to do to figure this shit out. The answer sits shining in the parking lot. Someone from the club must’ve brought it by.

The stairs creak beneath my feet as I walk to the parking lot.

Seconds later, my leg’s slung over my bike and it’s rumbling between my thighs with a promise to take me where I need to go. To take me away from Samantha, the woman who’s turned my entire world upside down.

I shut my eyes, revel in the roar, imagine myself far away, from here, from my problems, from my thoughts.

A hand taps me on the shoulder.

I look, see Samantha standing there, naked, a flush look on her face and a clutch of clothes in her hand.

“What the hell are you doing?” I say.

“I heard you leaving. We’re supposed to stay together.”

“So you ran out here naked?”

“I grabbed my clothes. I just didn’t have time to put them on,” she says, and pulls on a bra and slips her shirt over her head. The face that emerges has ruffled hair, a smile, and eyes that lock me tight like handcuffs. “I wasn’t going to let you just take off like that.”

“I need to ride. Need to clear my head.”

“We can do that together,” she says, pulling on her underwear and pants, before tossing a leg over the side of my bike and hopping on behind me. It twists me up inside how right, how natural, it feels to have her behind me, chest against my back, hands on my hips, legs gently clamped against mine. Her breath tickles my ear in the best way, and it makes the guilt inside me cry out — leave — while something else inside me relishes how right it feels to have her pressed against me. Only one other person ever made me feel that way. “Just please go easy. I’ve never ridden one of these before—“

I can’t resist; I tear out of the parking lot with her screaming like a banshee, her piercing shriek of fear cutting through the engine’s roar. And then that shriek turns into a howl of laughter as I cut onto a straightaway and cut loose — it’s irresistible joy, and a smile turns up the corner of my lips, a smile that I try to fight with all my strength, telling myself it’s wrong to be smiling with her after what I’ve done, but that smile still feels so natural, so right, that I can’t stop it.

Then I look over my shoulder and see her laughing face; I glimpse a beautiful woman trapped in a hurricane of hair that obscures everything except the joy coming from her mouth in riotous exclamations.

I laugh, too, my joy throwing itself from my mouth and into the screaming wind.

Fuck, this feels right.

It hits me how only the truth can.

In that place so deep, so hard, that the echoes of its impact ring through my soul; yelling, laughing, screaming out the pain that’s been burning in my chest ever since Brandy died — died because of me — I take us faster, faster, faster, out of town until we are whipping down mountain roads, with trees raising their branches towards us, cheering us on, with pine needles batting my face, with the smell of recent rain in the air, and then we reach an overlook and I pull us to the side of the road, gravel crunching beneath the tires, my chest heaving like I’ve run a marathon, my blood boiling, burning away the nightmarish pain of regret, and Samantha leaps off the bike like she thought she’d never touch the ground again, her legs as wobbly as the laughter that shakes her whole body.

I follow, laughing still.

“That was crazy,” she says, smiling. “I thought I was going to die a hundred times. What possessed you to drive like that? Were you trying to kill us?”

I cock my head and look at her, still smiling, before I answer. She’s grinning so wide I don’t want to tell her the real reason that I had in my heart when I first cranked the accelerator, that maybe I was.

Maybe I thought it was the easy way out.

But as I look at her now, I know that’s not the case.

Because she’s shown me something about herself — no matter how hard I go, no matter the obstacles I throw in her way, when it comes to this, she’s going to fight to hang on.

Fight to hang on to me.

“Sometimes I need to ride like that. To have that feeling that, maybe…”

My voice trails off, but Samantha nods as if I’d given her a fucking essay instead of a handful of words. She touches my shoulder, then my lips with hers. It’s quick, kind.

“I get it. Sometimes, we all do things like that to feel like, maybe, something just might…” She says, then swallows, then gives my arm a squeeze. “But I want you to know something: you don’t have to take those rides alone. You have me.”

“I have you?”

“You do.”

“Why? I fucking kidnapped you.”

“You did. And I guess that makes me your prisoner and your responsibility, too. But even if I wasn’t your prisoner, I’d still be with you. Because I don’t let go of the people I believe in. The people that matter to me. The people I want. And, despite your best efforts, Diesel, you’re one of them.” She hesitates, then gives me a peck on the check. “I think you can understand that, too. I know the lengths you’ll go to for your friends. What you did for Hunter. Can we stop fighting now?”

With my arms around her, I pull her closer. Turn that gentle touch and light kiss into something deeper, something that I sink myself, and in the electric touch of our lips, I feel my heart beat in ways it hasn’t in years.

When we separate, breathless, I look into eyes that see past all the walls I’ve built around my heart. Look past them and break them down to their very foundation.

Then I look toward my bike.

“We can. But there’s something better we can do instead.”

“Which is?”

“Seeing how fast I can get us back to the apartment, so we can…”

She cuts me off and shakes her head. “No.”

“No?”

“I can only take nearly dying by motorcycle one time per day, and you’ve just hit my quota.” Samantha pauses, looks around the clearing, then returns her eyes to mine. There’s a sparkle in them, and a smile on her face. “So instead of waiting, how about we just make the best of where we are?”